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An Open Letter on Obamacare

Craig Daliessio isn’t by nature an angry man. But recent events have brought him to the end of his rope.

“The past five years have just worn me down,” he told me over the phone. He couldn’t help but write about his experience.

After years of economic struggle, the loss of his home, and failure to find steady employment, Daliessio shared “An Open Letter to Barack Obama,” which is spreading quickly on blogs and social media.

Mr. President, three days ago I was informed that a job I had been offered only a week before, has been withdrawn. The company decided to freeze hiring for the foreseeable future. Part of their reasoning was the rising cost of healthcare, making it unaffordable for them to provide. This unaffordable-ness came as a result of your “Affordable Care Act.”

Five years ago I might have smiled at the irony of those words. But I’m not smiling.

In the letter, Daliessio describes his life since December 2008 when he lost his career as a mortgage broker. The real estate collapse hit the industry hard. Workers without political connections bore most of the pain.

Soon he lost his Nashville-area dream house, but as a single dad he wanted to stay close to his daughter. Instead of fleeing to Texas, North Dakota or another conservative holdout where jobs were slightly more plentiful, he stayed in Tennessee.

Without a home, he lived in his car.

Sleeping in your car is actually against the law. It’s vagrancy and so it required me to hide my car in some tall brush behind a church in Nashville. I took showers at the County Rec Center. I ate every other day sometimes. I worked every odd job I could find and put out hundreds of resumes. To date I have put out almost 250 resumes to no avail… I kept on trying. I kept on being my daughter’s dad. I refused to let her see me broken so I hid my tears.

Instead of limiting himself to a career in his profession, Daliessio worked odd jobs and even resumed his college education through an online program. A year ago he graduated from Liberty University. He still didn’t have a home, but now he had an education. And hope.

“But no doors opened,” he said. He continued with the odd jobs, sending resumes, and sleeping in his car or a friend’s couch or a borrowed office space. “Writing became a haven,” he told me. Over the past five years, he has written and self-published four books, the most recent titled Remembering America.

Earlier this month, it appeared as if the long job search was about to bear fruit. A job offer was extended. But last week the company withdrew their offer to Daliessio due in part to Obamacare. That law requires him to sign up for a health insurance exchange, but he finally decided that enough is enough.

I will NOT be registering for that exchange. I am a man. I am a dad. I am an American. I want to pay my own way. I refuse to let others pay for something I would gladly pay for myself…

I want a job. I want to work, and pay my own way. Your job is to create an environment whereby employers can hire men and women like me. Then we can take responsibility for ourselves, and pay our own way.

I respectfully refuse your handout, sir.

Though politically conservative, Daliessio has never been a bomb-thrower. “I don't wish [Obama] ill, but I wish people would wake up,” he told me. “The country is stuck in neutral. My letter came from a place of frustration and brokenness.”

Read Daliessio’s letter and forward it to others. And let’s hope it gets to President Obama as well.

Precisely why my fiancee failed to get hired from a temp position at her last employer. They outright told her the benefits were costing them too much with the new "healthcare" proposal and wouldn't be able to add a new position even though they had the need for the work.

Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who helped the Obama administration craft ObamaCare, is trying to downplay his comments at a October 2013 panel discussion, during which he bragged about the designed "lack of transparency" in the Affordable Care Act and the "stupidity of the American voter."

The Department of Health and Human Services expects ObamaCare enrollments through the federal and state exchanges to come in between 9 million and 9.9 million by the end of 2015, according to CNBC, far lower than the most recent estimate released by the Congressional Budget Office in April of this year:

More than a year after the Obama administration launched the federal ObamaCare exchange, HealthCare.gov, is still giving health insurance companies problems. Though the second open enrollment period is just days away from launching, backend systems that are supposed to communicate with insurers aren't yet finished, according to Politico:

ObamaCare is, once again, headed to the nation's highest court. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over an IRS rule that granted tax credit subsidies to states that opted not to create an ObamaCare exchange. By granting review, the Supreme Court is going against the wishes of the Obama administration, which had argued that the case, King v. Burwell, should work its way through lower courts:

A majority of HealthCare.gov and state-based exchange users say they don't plan to use the ObamaCare exchanges when the second open enrollment period begins on November 15, according to a survey conducted by BankRate.com. Experts surmise that many consumers who bought health plans on the exchanges will auto-renew, which could mean they'll end up paying more for coverage.

In September 2009, during an interview with a local Fox affiliate, Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) told Coloradans that "[i]f you have an insurance policy you like, doctor or medical facility that provides medical services to you, you'll be able to keep that doctor or that insurance policy." There was no ambiguity in his statement, just the same line that was repeated by President Obama and other Senate Democrats to help sell ObamaCare to a skeptical public.

Young people who have, under the threat of a punitive tax, purchased health insurance coverage on the individual market have seen their premiums skyrocket under ObamaCare. While premiums have increased substantially for everyone, a new study shows that millennials have seen larger increases than their older counterparts:

The effects of the Affordable Care Act have been so unpleasant that it is becoming increasingly hard even to find Democrats willing to praise the law. So far, ObamaCare has done pretty much the exact opposite of everything its architects promised. But it would be naive to expect Democrats to admit their mistake outright. Instead of acknowledging the increasingly difficult to deny truth that ObamaCare is a disaster that needs to be uprooted in its entirety, the go-to talking point has become that the law just needs to be “fixed.” With the right legislative patches, they argue, we can transform this lumbering behemoth into something that can actually function.

In his 2006 book, Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, explained that "perhaps our most pressing task is to fix our broken healthcare system," adding that "the two main government-funded healthcare programs -- Medicare and Medicaid -- really are broken." During the early stages of the healthcare reform debate in 2009, he again emphasized these two "broken" programs.

On October 1st of last year, ObamaCare’s inaugural enrollment period launched with all of the grace of a rocket exploding on its launch pad. Double-digit premium hikes, cancelled plans, and non-functioning websites caused misery for millions, leaving even supporters of the law lacking for words at times. This October there is silence, with few outside of the beltway focused on anything to do with ObamaCare.